The Ungodly Meme: The Last Christian and the Angel

By Celticus Jo

The world is in crisis. The last Christian in England tries to convert his wife but fails. He turns to re-educating children, but this proves dangerous. The one girl who responds to him disappears. But in his last days he meets an angel who announces a change that will transform the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Jan 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781528996792

Celticus Jo

Celticus Jo is a novelist and poet. He writes about the spiritual life amidst anxiety and violence. He has extensive knowledge of Ireland, Africa, and the Middle East. He loves and paints the natural world.

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About the Author

Celticus Jo is a novelist and poet. He writes about the spiritual life amidst anxiety and violence. He has extensive knowledge of Ireland, Africa, and the Middle East. He loves and paints the natural world.

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Celticus Jo 2022

The right of Celticus Jo to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781528996785 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781528996792 (ePub e-book)

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Chapter One

The Ungodly Meme

The children were behaving strangely, Gonzo, aged five, playing up particularly badly. He had been given an iPhone when he was four (an iPad when he was one). Sebastian said the infant knew everything; except boundaries. His parents had failed to teach him the meaning of the word ‘No!’ Gonzo was experimenting with different ringtones in a science lesson. Science lessons for five-year-olds? Taught by Sebastian?

Sebastian announced he was the teacher and it was his lesson. Gonzo facetimed his mum, who, there and then, in front of the whole class put Sebastian straight. She was the customer, she said.

What made it worse, Gonzo had an app which took a photo of Sebastian and redacted it slowly into a teacher with no trousers on, then no trunks on, to the wild cheers of the kindergarten and the Cloud.

Mr, said Gonzo, you are a meme. (He pronounced it Mimi).

This appropriation of the word by an infant made Sebastian look silly. One small disruptive boy, a multimedia expert, had taken control.

But not for long.

Sebastian had done his homework. For some time, he had thought that the iPhone possessed the child. For the sake of argument maybe, it had entered the child’s flesh and blood. A plan was hatched to exorcise the boy and the phone, both. Sebastian, a bad-ass atheist, decided to empty the child of memes, including his parents’ conversations, ideas, personalities, a needed pruning.

Surprisingly, Sebastian mobilised a priest to perform the exorcism. The priest did all he could to make Gonzo comfortable. But I knew Sebastian. He had a chequered history in the classroom. Yet on this occasion, he kind of got away with it. How could this be? Exorcism is Christian. Exorcism means evil driven out. This is not a widely-held idea in liberal circles, or the tapeworm. C. S. Lewis said that evil exists so man can make choices. No evil, no choices. No choices, and we are amoral and sit around sucking our thumbs. Put it another way: if there was no evil, the future of mankind would be clever but meaningless.

A scientist might argue that there is no evidence of evil anyway. But then scientists are odd. The blessed Stephen Hawking was justifiably proud of his imagination and what it revealed about black holes. But then his discoveries about black holes provided him with an explanation of absolutely everything, including the universe which popped into existence out of the first black hole, by observing the iron laws of black holes (luckily, just published by a certain Stephen Hawking thereby vindicated). God is redundant, he said, and does not need to exist. Dawkins spent a life in winning an NVQ in gene plumbing. He too is very satisfied with the quality of his work and finds God not just redundant but offensive. Einstein, a Jew, found the Bible inferior and rejected what he called a personal God. As he got famous, he became entitled to legislate what sort of God may be allowed to be.

With top scientists like this, it is hardly surprising that ‘evil’, like ‘beauty’ and ‘truth’, hasn’t been scientifically discovered let alone measured; it hasn’t been captured in the laboratory. Scientists are too busy popularising themselves. If evil does exist, perhaps it can be observed inside the brain like a tapeworm. There is evidence that humans, under the stress of sensory deprivation, can, on the road to Tarsus, completely change beliefs. The previous occupant of the brain is expelled. In other words, a scientist can point to abreaction and a change of brain activity within. But not without. Sebastian had been trying to teach science.

With the aid of an iPhone at max volume, his pupil, the little nutter, Gonzo, aired a blasphemous attack upon the Bible, no doubt inspired by the great scientists of the age. Sebastian did not object to this. He was an atheist. But he objected to the child. Enter stage right the exorcist. Dum dum dum te deum.

Maybe the whole thing was fake news tricked out by Sebastian. His atheism was fashionable in a populist, ephemeral kind of way.

Nowadays, we can all expel our demons; freedom is everything. But once freedom is weaponised, an atheist can drive out and install demons wherever he likes, not just in swine but in national socialists or ISIS or a president. Liberals cannot believe in evil as this would give the lie to their notion that had they been around in the thirties, Hitler could not have existed. All men, especially scientists, have their creation myth. Mine is Genesis. For me, it is the perfect meta-narrative. It fulfils my beliefs. I believe man lies so far short of his Creator that if the distance between Him and humanity is imagined as a Plank Length of 1.6x10-35 m across, it can be divided into the space of a billion universes; if you get my drift, so we may understand how far we fall short of God.

Sebastian took a different approach. He was a materialist. You can’t get more stupid than that. To him, microbes were the be-all and end-all. They lay deep in the earth beneath our feet and in the turds we lay. They floated in the air. They inhabited our intestines and dialled up for non-stop room service, demanding their favourite foods and causing the eating disorders and mood swings that plague the West. Yet to Sebastian, they, the microbes of the biome, were the creators. Can you believe it? They are divine. We are their creation. They outnumber the summer stars. Collectively, their intelligence is vast. Collectively, humans are foolish. We destroy our habitat. We have come to believe we are divine. We view the biome as of no consequence and pass on to the next stage of hallucination. Sebastian believed the microbes created Prometheus and Lucifer. When they choose, they will uncreate us. In his dystopian view, they created Sebastian, an immensely complex product. To me, this was blasphemy. Sebastian said he wakes in the night and thinks: I am. Then, as dawn breaks, he thinks: I am not. Out he floats from sleep with a terrible sense of immolation. He thinks he is dead.

He smells his hands beneath the sheets to see if he is. He feels an overwhelming sense of emptiness. He imagines he is surrounded by enemies. Amongst them, he numbers me, my aunt Rosemary and Arthur. He is ill. He suffers the illness of the modern world. Materialism. How many human beings suffer as he suffers? Who will help him take the right path? I pray for those like him who are dying of anomie and disbelief. Meanwhile, the child Gonzo was adversely affected by this abuse of exorcism as I was to discover.

Chapter Two

Dolorosa

Exorcism was a subject for discussion at home. Remember, Milly? Mum said. Went to live in Streatham? Very cosmopolitan. She made me laugh.

Laugh! Christianity, she said, was invented by men. Democracy was invented by men. War is invented by men. Materialism was invented by men. I loved Khashoggi, she said, I love the Arab people. But isn’t it obvious a society that confers on God the chore of killing will let its priests and rulers (all men) kill as well? Khashoggi’s murder was sanctified long ago.

What are you saying? I asked, horrified.

Man is a demon, said Milly. Since she moved to Streatham, she’d met some extraordinary people. From every corner of the world. Men are violent, said Milly. And they all need a good seeing to.

The mistake is to dismiss violence as exceptional, Mum said. Again, and again, the same thing happens. Attila, Custer, Hitler. These are men of a certain type, never women.

I see what you mean, I said. Like the Pharaohs? the lycanthrope Assyrians?

The what? she said.

The wounded Celts, I said, the swarming Huns, the revenant Germans.

Well, anyway, she said, Horror, brutality is what you get. It never ends.

I know, I said. Blood begets blood. The taste for blood, at first denied, becomes refined.

Becomes what? Milly had to ask.

Endemic. Napoleon, Pol Pot, each had his own signature of death; each is a meme of something old and vile. I know what you are saying, Milly, I said. The suicides, the infanticides, the genocides, the trophies of masculinity. My husband may be a fool. But he is right about one thing; Christianity alone stands against man.

"I thought Christianity was violent, Milly said. Anyway, men keep doing it. Again, and again, until we get pregnant. Why?"

I don’t know, I’m sure, I said.

But here’s a funny thing, said Milly. In Streatham, we are, you know, Horticultural?

Multicultural? I suggested.

Whatever. My next-door neighbour Consuela is half-African half-Venezuelan. She is always pregnant, I kid you not. Well, it was her said they do it again and again? We get pregnant; only, she said, most of history was still borns. Tragic really.

I know, I said.

Well, she said, Consuela and her family believe in a Saint called Santa Muerte. They are convinced that half of the pregnancies are an infection, men infecting girls with demons. The only defence is abortion, she says. And those babies that get through can be exorcised also. Apparently, a lot of midwives are priests or sisters calling forth demons from the womb.

But how do they know? I asked her.

Well. Consuela says they look no different for the most part. To the mother, they are beautiful. It takes time, Consuela says. But sooner or later, there are tell-tale signs. Violence, addiction, drugs, computer games, pornography. Too late for abortion now.

Remember, this was my mother recounting a conversation with Milly who was recounting a conversation with someone called Consuela. I could not stop myself from interrupting. How can you take any of this seriously? I asked.

Don’t be intolerant! my mother replied. Milly may not be all there, but when you’re older, you’ll find yourself asking why the church is in decline. Your father spent his life defending it. But here’s the thing. So many died during the war. Shortly after that, the decline set in.

Then Mum let rip. Violence, she wailed. The sea, black waves, night, threatening, swollen, arterial, tumescent, until in uncontrollable fury, they crush, dismember and suck down life. Time and again, the souls of men erupt out of a serene skyscape. A stirring is felt in nature. Small acts of violence alarm; they command attention, then admiration, then worship. Soon men lose their bearings. They presume life can be eternal. Pharaohs enslave, oppress, in pursuit of apotheosis. Tombs fill with unimaginable cries. Vast edifices are built, and in them, treasures breed evil. Tribes from generation to generation survive on plunder. And death is revealed at last as the chimera.

These storms are made by men, maddened by power, and a craving for eternal life. Priest-kings. Aztecs eat their hearts out. Maya. Some say they searched for proteins wrapped in human flesh. But that uncontrollable vortex of greed, of violence, was wrought with the energy of madness into fine-spun aeons of cruelty. Man overwhelms mankind. Europe writhed in its brutality. The Icelandic Sagas echo their bloody tales. Bloodlust, the virus-unleashing plague breaks out, again and again, infecting us degenerate and powerful. Hitler longed for immortality: the thousand-year Reich. Stalin made genocide the immortal icon of Marxism. For millennia, such people exacted bloody murders on the creatures they despised. Hitler and Akhenaton designed those rites and forced them upon subjects of torn flesh.

But now, Man chose materialism; Darwin and Marx. They discarded religion. Darwin cultivated unbelief and so, sleep-walking, joined the ranks of the unbelievers: Marx, de Sade, Polanski, Stalin, Nietzsche, Tynan, Engels, Hirst, poltroons who knew not that by denying God, they deny Gaia her curators. So, the world empties. The materialists harness science and invent poisons. Life diminishes. Darwin’s children number each species as each goes extinct. Marx promises equality based on the falsehood of repression. Arabia, corrupted by Philby, drowns in greed. Technology destroys the planet unchecked. Can this terrible cycle be broken? Yes, says your dad, by the Lamb.

In this peroration, my mother emerged from the fog she herself had created, continuously fanning her thurifer of cigarettes, spreading smoke in a miasma of a hundred-a-day fog. She spurted clouds from her mouth and chewed blue scraps of nicotine fudge, imbued upon her breath and congealing on her teeth. The great religions of the world reveal His will. Global warming reveals His judgement, terror in its wake.

Chapter Three

Hah! Habeas Corpus

Faith was dying. Demons had a hand in it. Sebastian for one. Our church was beautiful yet grizzled; its stonework stained with white and orange lichens, plashed like graffiti on the base of the tower and across a hundred gravestones which lounged and leant in the yard. Yet it was beautiful. The tower was like a sword cutting open the sky above and pulled out the sun laying it out on heaven. Whatever the time of day, one side was always blanched by light. We would walk the five churches of our five parishes and sang the Ave Verum. Out of light, we processed into dark, mounting the steps into the choir. Our singing brought each church to life. Yet only the old knew the password, only the old could read the software of the altar cloth, and the funeral pall, secrets in dark velvet, vestments heavy with embroidery, needlework encrypted, to defeat the malware of disbelief. The algorithm of Christ lay hidden in books, in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, which we could not read. In this archaeology, the holy lands were forgotten. Second sons, philologists, bibliophiles, the foremost scholars of Kentish history like sphinxes, cunningly hid their secrets, once the ordinance in a war against the unbelievers. Christ shone his light into my darkness. The world once pristine flowered into churches which shone in beauty.

The tide turned like the incoming sea at Camber. Wickedness raced in upon the unwary. The breakwaters of belief no more protected. The wisdom of the Gospels, of the Gnostics, of Hermes Trismegistus, were replaced by a single electric lightbulb in the lychgate. It rained. The light went out.

The way to church is dark. The wood rots and is not tended. A chain of bats roosting in the nave leave unsightly droppings on the threadbare carpet below. The elderly sing, creaking out in a tuneless hope of redemption. Yet back in the day, I sensed an effulgence, too beautiful to apprehend. Now it is vanishing behind my tears.

This church, my father said, was dedicated to Saint Anne, the Saint of water and the holy springs. But Saint Anne is long gone. The hidden wells of Christianity are blocked up, filled with the rubble of modernity. The pump is stuck. There is no water to mop the stone floor in the choir.

Is the church capable of survival or is it a great fossil of some ancient animal, long since extinct, origins forgotten, majesty quite lost to ignorance?

My aunt Rosemary had no belief. Rosemary’s mother was in an orphanage between the wars. Because she was never there, her children loved her more. But in the way of orphans, they adopted their elder sister as their stepmother. This made her serious, authoritarian, strangely cold when warmth was needed, yet, though withdrawn, she was passionately protective of her two small sisters and her